Back to the Scottish Gypsies with Me! :-)

As a gift to myself when I graduated from high school, I brazenly took a week off work at my new job, with my new credit card, and traveled to England and Scotland.

In my heart, I had a feeling it might be the only travelling I would get to do, so I wanted to make sure it happened.

I was totally alone, riding trains and going from town to town, not even sure how I would feed myself. It was great good fortune that I survived and made it home, really.

One morning I woke up in a hostel in Kyle of Loch Alsh in Scotland, and wandered out early to sit on a pebbly beach and watch the clouds roll over the mountains and across the water as the sun came up. A moment I've revisited often in my mind over the years.

 

That moment came with a feeling of recognition I never could explain - a strong feeling of deja vu and comfort in my surroundings that seemed strange at the time.

So I've always felt that my ancestry came from Scotland, even though I never knew for sure.

Yesterday, I knew for sure.

One of the items I retrieved from my mother's house after the death of my father was a book of genealogy, about my Grandmother Lora Stockwell's line.

And in very dense, historical and factual terms, it laid out how William Stockwell Sr. travelled to Massachusetts as a teenager (probably) to become an indentured servant in America. His grandfather was born somewhere in Scotland around 1603.

It must have been some kind of poverty that made him want to leave. I know, that morning I watched Scottish clouds roll over Scottish mountainsides, that it would have taken threat of death for me to leave that beautiful place.

So the roots are firmly there, and now I'm looking up Scottish songs from that era, which turn out to be largely Gypsy songs. (which explains my preference of Halloween costumes for the past 40 years)...

Wish I knew where in Scotland they were from, but that's another mystery to solve in later days.